Posts Tagged ‘Hadoop’

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Excel

With Microsoft’s new PowerPivot capabilities, and spreadsheet user interfaces to data sets in Hadoop by IBM BigSheets and Datameer, spreadsheets are more viable than ever as an analytics and business intelligence (BI) tool, to the consternation of some BI program managers.

At Gartner BI Summit 2010, in April in Las Vegas, Gartner advised BI advocates to give up trying to wean business users off Excel, and instead accept that Excel is here to stay. Sri Vemparala, manager of reporting and BI at Stanford University, told Craig Stedman at TechTarget “No matter what we try to do, I don’t think we can get away from Excel.” Gartner analyst John Hagerty advises IT departments to follow a rapid-iteration model to create and update reports, and allow business users to decide how to deploy data, whether in BI software interfaces, dashboards, Excel, SharePoint or other collaboration tools.

The Next LAMP Stack: Hadoop Platform for Big Data Analytics

Many Fortune 500 and mid-size enterprises are intrigued by Hadoop for Big Data analytics and are funding Hadoop test/dev projects, but would like to see Hadoop evolve into a more fully integrated analytics platform, similar to what the LAMP (Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP) stack has enabled for web applications. For example, head of technology strategy and innovation at credit card giant Visa, Joe Cunningham, told the audience at last year’s Hadoop World that he would like to see Visa’s use of Hadoop evolve from an alpha/beta environment into mainstream use for transaction analysis, but has concerns about integration and operations management.

Hadoop, Memcached and Solid-state Storage

Hosted at Stanford University, Accel Partners brought together executives from four of their portfolio companies to discuss evolution of a “New Data Stack” incorporating Hadoop, memcached and sold-state storage. Read the rest of this entry »